Emily Is Away

Title: Emily Is Away
Series: Emily Is Away #1
Publisher: Kyle Seeley
Developer: Kyle Seeley
Release Date: November 20, 2015
Genres: Indie, Simulation, Visual Novel
Platform: Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows, Steam
Where to Buy: Steam, itch.io
Rating:

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Remember a time before Facebook and Skype? When Windows XP was the next big thing and AIM was king. Relive that era with Emily is Away. Create a screenname and browse buddy infos in this chat-bot meets adventure game. Explore your relationship with Emily, a fellow high school student, in a branching narrative where you choose the outcome. And most importantly, change your text color to lime green so people know you're the coolest kid in school.

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Review

Emily is Away is a short interactive fiction game about a friendship told through AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). Taking place between 2002 and 2006, you chat with your high school friend Emily, a girl that you may have a mutual attraction to. The story starts near the end of high school and carries on through college graduation.

The game is very straightforward, you select from one of three choices and carry on a conversation. Responses appear as you type on your keyboard, and simple things like the player deleting text or adding an emoji communicates the tone of the conversation organically. The sound effects, user bios, and color choices were nostalgic. You can read the user bios of other people on your friends list but interactions are limited to chats with Emily. While the UI is not a perfect one-to-one recreation, it comes close.

As for the story, it can be finished in about a half hour. You make a few choices that will impact events in the story, but the outcome remains the same for each chapter. While you get some sense of character’s personalities from their bios, characterization is pretty bare bones., but I didn’t really mind this.

Despite it’s brevity, or perhaps because of, this game elicits strong feelings from players. There is a fair number of reviewers that become frustrated that they can’t control the outcome of the narrative and “win,” entering into incel territory. Others find the game uncomfortable with certain events and their implications. More still lament the obvious male coded language of the main character, despite there being no stated gender.

For myself personally, I don’t mind that all roads led to the same outcome. I can agree that the protagonist is definitely a guy, but I’d make the case however that the heteronormative tone is actually accurate for the time period; the aughts were extremely misogynistic and homophobic. I too found certain aspects uncomfortable, but I have no issue reading from the perspective of a morally grey character.

I was a few years younger than the characters in this game, having graduated high school in 2005, but I spent my middle and high school years chatting with friends and my first boyfriend on AIM during the same time period. The game does a good job of capturing that awkward feeling of talking to a crush, and the quiet disappointment of friendships fizzling out as you move onto new phases in life. I liked the game despite it’s flaws, it tells an emotional story that feels grounded in reality.

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